skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PayPal screwed us too, just not very big, but we won't use them ever again. Bad news is, when you are in business, many of the other businesses who call you a "cherished" customer will fuck you in a second the instant you present any liability to their business model at all. Problem is, they won't be honest with you up front about what your place in that business model is. They'll lie to get you to believe you are the cherished customer. Just remember they're all whores who only do it for the money and that will guide you to make wise decisions that CYA at all times.
> And this was de rigueur for Nokia.

I always wondered how the write ups from this individual jived with the rest of what I had heard about Nokia. Like you said, he's clearly a smart guy. However, he glosses over Nokia's ridiculous management strategy and practices like subcontracting hardware design. Not to mention the clearly dying Symbian OS, which was abundantly clear to anyone who had used it and a modern smartphone at the same time.

Elop has a significant share of the blame to take, but I wouldn't chastise him for killing Symbian and MeeGo. Symbian was an old-world mobile hellhole akin to PalmOS, and MeeGo wasn't even close to ready in 2011.
Watch Man Utd vs Stoke Live Stream 20/10/2012
Assuming that there's some small but non-zero chance of a randomly selected line intersecting with a star in a finite volume of space, it's pretty clear that for an infinite volume, the probability of hitting at least one star will approach 1. (So long as the density of stars is approximately constant, or at least has some lower bound.)

And since stars are not point like objects, a line does indeed have a non-infinitesimal chance of intersecting a star.

Although all of this is a bit different from arguing about the net brightness of light coming from distant stars.
Awww. In an attempt to recreate Inception, I tried to run Foon (a ZX-Spectrum Emulator for the GBA that I wrote about a decade ago) on it. Unfortunately it crashed almost immediately :(
> Meditation is a state, where the mind is completely silent

That wasn't my experience. I tried very hard to attain that "no thought" state. At best, I was able to let my thoughts flow without holding on to them.

I concluded that silent mind thing is an analogy. The opposite of "don't think of a pink elephant" causes you to think of a pink elephant. When you have "no thought" you just let the thought come and go without trying to process (consider, internalize, whatever) it.

But I haven't compared notes with others, gurus, whomever. YMMV.
An Iterative Approach to Building an API – Part 2: Adding ElasticSearch
There seems to have been an influx of these sort of posts on HN recently.

To be honest, engineers are just people. A wide sample of folks from different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, educational-backgrounds, etc etc.

This wildcard lumping of people into various categories has got to stop. It's ridiculous to say the least, and really does the profession harm when you separate the engineer from the individual in question.

People are different.
That looks really impressive. Any plans to release for iphone/pod? No tablet here :/
Privilege is essentially a shaming tactic. It's proponents believe that they can create a reverse social hierarchy by convincing those supposedly at the top (straight while males) that every aspect of their lives benefits from a social advantage they don't know they have. Thus straight white males are encouraged to live in a constant state of paranoia and shame essentially for being born. For those who accept this belief system, the only way to achieve harmony with those around you is to actively "give away your privilege" which is to say sabotage and undermine your own potential and achievements so that other, less privileged persons may somehow benefit. How this should be done is typically left unclear. As with most "social justice" belief systems the point is to spread guilt and shame. Ultimately, this belief system just further stigmatizes those that it seeks to help by not only classifying people by race, class and gender but by states of privilege as well.
Why unfortunately? They can hardly cover everything! And they certainly can't mention everything covered in the syllabus.

Typically it would be discussed in the context of cosmology; if they don't cover cosmology at all that's unfortunate, but not mentioning this very specific footnote to it would be understandable. And even if they do plan on covering it, I'd be a little surprised if it was listed on the syllabus.
Where is it that Zach implied that what he's talking about there is only applicable if you've decided to build a "great" product, but if you're aiming to build just a "mediocre", "successful" (but not "great"), then what he's saying is completely irrelevant and not applicable to you?

I realize you don't speak for him, but I'm curious if I legitimately misunderstood something here.
I think there is a key difference between appointment reminder and the two other things (consulting and the course).

AR is something that will provide residuals that will continue for quite some time. During that time you will have to improve the product (at your leisure) and basically keep the infrastructure running. In return you will collect $29 to $199 per month, every month. No need to resell those that are already paying you money. You just have to keep them happy. Although I have some issues with the price points you have chosen (I know you have probably blogged about this and know much about it I would have taken a different strategy) leaving that aside for now I see the other things you are doing as simply distractions (as you realized) from spending time on the thing that will pay off long term.

I had an opportunity, way way back, to get in on the ground floor of the PC business but didn't have the capital. Instead of getting others involved I started another business to earn money which I sold profitably after 10 years but it was no way as successful as fulfilling the thing that I started out would have been. It was just a distraction. You stand the chance at getting sucked into the "success" of the consulting and the courses because they are making you money. And what will happen is that instead of creating things with residuals (like AR) you will constantly have to work to keep that up with new ideas and materials. Rather than just being able to have a residual business, which, from my opinion and experience, is much better. My advice is therefore to bite the bullet and take money from others that will allow you to grow the SAAS (and then create other SAAS).

My quick idea would be to setup a network of college students to sell the white label version walking literally door to door in office parks signing up professionals (doctors dentists) to use this product by giving them 3 months for free or something like that.
Notch has been releasing quite a few gameplay clips recently. The best place to catch them is http://reddit.com/r/0x10c -- he often frequents the forum.
I don't think it's a matter of bandwidth. The document is being served up just fine; the only feature that seems to have been disabled is real-time commenting.

Google Docs, like most of their applications, is built on a highly available, globally-distributed database. (There's evidence that it was using Megastore as of a couple years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's now been migrated to Spanner.) That lets them scale to effectively infinite numbers of users, but it doesn't solve the problem of handling thousands of concurrent readers and writers all contending for the same individual rows in a multi-TB table, from multiple datacenters around the world.
I'm increasingly curious what you consider commercial - there's an awful lot of businesses out there with the exact same monetization methods as TPB that are indisputably "commercial".

The line between "aiding file sharing" and "file sharing is their business model" is also very, very questionable. We all saw what happened to Mininova when they stopped "aiding".
I believe that the law should be either-or: either you can come to the courts to seek remedy for infractions of your copyrights or you can pursue vigilante justice through DRM schemes. If a company drops a rootkit into your computer because you popped in a CD, well, then I think the courts should wash their hands of it if that company then insists that their extrajudicial measures failed.
Ehh, the CMB doesn't come from stars, so bringing it up in this context is a bit of a red herring.
There should definitely be a progress bar in there but it doesn't actually upload the file anywhere, it uses the HTML5 file API which lets you read files locally.
Providence Equity Sells Its Stake In Hulu
This would be acceptable
excuse if you stopped claiming to be a safe way to conduct online transactions when it's only safe for 1/2 of the people who use it.
Also being a dev who can market is an unfair advantage over substantially all devs and substantially all marketers. It is seriously unreal.

An example near and dear to my heart: consider an engineer, a marketer, and one of us weird chimeras all studying a graph of feature adoption among the userbase. The engineer things "Hmm, only 20% of the customers use X. That's unfortunate. Maybe they don't need it." The marketer thinks: "Maybe we should mention that in our newsletter." The chimera says: "All users who haven't Xed with receive a guide to why they want to do that automatically on the 4th day of the trial and it is also covered in the onboarding process. That's live in production as an A/B test. We'll know in two weeks whether it is a discoverability problem or a user need problem. Oh, that's actually a good point, maybe we should talk to the users about this. BRB guys I'm off to call five successful trial accounts who don't X and ask why."
Selling squatted domain names, running b2b startups in their spare time, making games for iOS.
Here's why I think it's true in some abstract sense. Actual details may not be quite so clear cut - apologies to patio11 if I'm tweaking things a bit to make a point.

Let's take the bingo card thing and ignore Appointment Reminder: it makes good money, but seems to have some kind of upper bound in that he's never going to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business.

On the other hand, he's developed some serious competence in things like A/B testing, email marketing, and things like that, and is able to demonstrate their effects on companies' profits and thus command a percentage of those profits or at least get paid really well. So, by selling to companies that deal in the millions of dollars, it's almost mathematical that he's going to bring in more money than by fiddling around with niche products.

That's not to say he could have gotten to B without first going through A (sorry:-), as he gained those skills with the niche product.
In general, I have problems with all credit card processing laws and companies. The actions of Visa and Mastercard when they "blacklisted" Julian Assange are especially troubling. The federal govt. allows these companies to position themselves where they can literally destroy a business in just a few days or weeks (mine could last only 2 weeks or so without them) and no one seems to care, we (and our courts - DOJ) are more concerned with whether or not Microsoft, Google, Mozilla or AOL makes the free browser you are using.
This is pretty normal behaviour in large scale software. We add 'circuit breakers' (usually time, memory and rate based) that prevent denial of service attacks and stop exposed algorithms breaking sensible time limits per request. The last thing you want is one customer causing quality of service problems for another.
Life is not so simple. A lot of people don't have the option to develop their ideas. That is why joining people who are building something similar ends up being a good option for them. They might not get the same financial benefit, but they may get other intangible benefits from it (pride, sense of accomplushment, experience).

Saying that joining a marketing person or hiring one is not the recipe for building a business. Realize that a business is not solely its marketing, nor programming. You cannot just take a program and market it, and become rich. Not so easy. It takes a lot of hustle (which is not marketing), and luck.
> Well have you ever independently verified any of his claims through your own experiential work?

Let's say that I believe Bigfoot exists. Have you ever independently falsified my belief yourself, personally? No? Then you have failed to meet your burden of evidence and Bigfoot really does exist.

What is wrong with the above claim? Apart from unfairly shifting the burden of evidence, the problem is that it contradicts the central posture of science toward evidence -- the null hypothesis, the precept that an idea is assumed to be false in the absence of positive evidence.

Using the null hypothesis as a logical basis, Grof's claims have no meaning until they are supported by positive scientific evidence (not merely the absence of contradicting evidence).

Without the null hypothesis, anything anyone cares to assert is accepted as true. I say that Bigfoot exists, and because you cannot disprove my claim by looking under every rock in the universe, my claim is true. The problem with my claim and posture is that disproof would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden, for reasons given here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_teapot

A quote: "Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others ..."

> I guess you missed the part where Grof said he was a materialist monoist Freudian prior to the use of therapeutic LSD in his practice.

Oh, well, that makes it all right then. I'm glad you cleared that up.

Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, to assert the central role of astrology in human affairs requires evidence.

> It was experiential evidence ...

"Experiential evidence" is not evidence, it is anecdote. Calling this "experiential evidence" is to string together terms that contradict each other.

> ... that caused Grof to revise his views of the world - what makes you change your mind?

The other kind of evidence -- the real kind. The kind of evidence on which two or more independent, dispassionate observers can agree. The kind of evidence that favors vaccines over dried gourds and witch doctors. The kind of evidence that dispassionately falsifies racism and sexism. The kind of evidence that keeps Creationism out of public classrooms.

Science is not merely a set of rules for identifying and processing evidence, for crafting and testing theories. It is also a way to undermine some really stupid ideas that appear spontaneously from time to time. Ideas like astrology.
Propose HN: HN Marketplace
What up guys,

Why there isn't an "official" HN Marketplace?

Why dont we create a site where you can sell, buy or exchange domains, websites, scripts, services and more.

If someone is interested in building it as a weekend project, I'd love to help designing its UI.

Bonus:
HNmarket.com is available.

If you are interested in having this but don't have time to help code it, maybe you can tell us what features you would like it to have.

(Contact information is in my profile)
Since when has a monopoly ever been a good thing?

In the U.S., it is the healthcare providers who form for-profit monopolies that jack up the prices and screw over the consumer - see for example: http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2012/07/well-done-partn...

I'm not a fan of monopoly, but I'd rather have a monopoly that works in the interest of getting all patients healthcare and bargaining down consumer prices, rather than a monopoly that creates higher costs to feed the profits of providers.

5 weeks of paid vacation for all working people ... I would rather leave that up to companies

I would rather have the vacation time. The problem is that most companies exist in a competive market, productivity is not absolute, but relative. If our company unilaterally allowed everyone to take 5 weeks vacation, the revenue would not fall 5% based on the lost productivity. It might fall 20 or 30% or more, because we would lose market share to our competitors, and we are fighting in a winner-takes-all market. But if all companies in our market had to offer 5 weeks vacation, and this was enforced, then we would all be on the same footing, and all would be better off. It's a classic collective action problem. And the way to solve a collective action problem is that you form an organization and agree on binding rules with punishment for defecting - this is called a government.
Posted on June 19th, <2007> in Management, Software/Web development

-- Whats was old, is now again New
The first release is for ipad only. Probably in next update/release iphone will be supported
It's definitely related to gender. There were never any males in the typing pool. As a male with an office, if you had a machine with a keyboard, it would have been seen as effeminate.

And quirky -- why would you type when you can have someone do it for you?
Thoughts On Running a Successful Meetup From Jeremia Kimmelman of Mobile Mondays
A software developer can be one without being in the software business. No need to market anything, ever. Now, if you want to sell software, then you better learn how to sell.

The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!".

What's depressing is this line of thinking. You just can't program something and expect people to buy it. You have to sell it.
That is true. This feature has been around for many years and used to be advertised on their navbar before Google+ came about, but it never stood out as a prominent component of the Google experience. I figure they are pushing people to adopt Google+ as their "portal" but I'm likely wrong as the two products are quite different. It could also be that it doesn't generate any revenue and the experiment is nearing the end of its life cycle.
For what it's worth, I have used CSS for years without knowing anything about specificity and never had to debug (more than a few seconds) anything related to specificity... If you actually have to use the formula to find out the specificity of a selector, I'd say there's likely something wrong with the way you code CSS.
> h2::first-line

…I've never seen this notation. I've always seen pseudos with just one colon.

Some quick testing in Textmate reveals that this does, indeed, work, as does the single colon I've always been using. Triple colons don't work.

And this only works for pseudo elements; pseudo classes only work with single colons.

At least in Webkit; I didn't bother checking my simple test-case in Firefox, Opera, or IE.

Huh.
That would make way too much sense.

The server hosting the public-facing site is across town (where the sysadmin works). The RDP step is for getting from our network to a non-public-facing machine that is physically right next to the public-facing machine.

Then, at two or three pre-appointed times during the week, the sysadmin transfers the contents of a folder onto a usb hard drive, and then eventually where it needs to go.

I suppose it's time to start reading the "Who is hiring" threads a little more closely.
This looks fantastic. Mind if I ask a couple questions?

1. Will the app support first generation iPads?

2. What will be the price?

Thanks I'm looking forward to trying it out.
> For those saying hes a normal guy who just likes trolling, the article mentions "Michael Brutsch had sex with his step daughter"

According to him, while trolling. Yeah, real solid source. Definitely grounds to ruin someone's life.

Also, since when is that a crime? Or even immoral? It could be a massive breach of trust and immoral, depending on the situation. However depending on the relationship between wife, daughter and the guy, it could be just regular cheating. Or not even that.

He didn't rape his stepdaughter, or coerce his daughter, or have consensual sex with his underage stepdaughter. What he did was have consensual sex with a grown woman he has no blood relation to and for all you know has no parental relationship with either.

Hardly the "case closed" indictment you want it to be, even if it allows you to string together the words "sex" and "daughter" in the same sentence to elicit a knee-jerk negative response.
Great question. I don't know. Public v private is a two-way fight. On my product team, I gave QA a seat at the table, creating a three-way fight.

Since I don't have any original notions of my own, I'm watching out for ideas, experiments, alternatives, supplements to public v private.

The only notion I've got is public v private v citizen. By citizen, I roughly mean open government, transparency, accountability. I've been VERY politically involved. In my spare time, I'm trying to make tools to better empower future citizen activists. Maybe level the playing field a bit.
Let me present another view why I dislike this kind of selling. I think this author sells a story of how they got rich and how you also can get rich (and how you can do this easily) It's a common scheme and I think the only people that are getting rich by this are the people that are selling this kind of knowledge.

The problem (at least based on my experience) is that building anything successful takes a huge amounts of dedication and effort -- there's also a large margin for failure. It's simply not something that's easy to reproduce and you probably won't make five-figures a month by selling things to a mailing list. Or create a 30x500 product and instantly be your own boss. And sure, there are some that are going to succeed at this (and great for them!), but presenting this like anybody will get rich by just following a scheme rings off alarm clocks, especially when this kind of knowledge is sold at a high cost.
My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.
Yes, because when the government grants monopoly power over abstract ideas -- something the current patent system isn't supposed to do but does anyway -- it puts its finger (if not its whole hand) on the scales of competition.

Patents don't exist to help the little guy; if they did, we'd have gotten rid of them a long time ago. An argument in defense of patents is inevitably an exercise in defending companies that make hundreds of millions in profits before they even begin to enforce those patents.

The profits should be enough.
It will be supported on ios version 5.1+
If you would have upgraded ios on your first gen ipad, this will be supported.

Not decided on price yet. Any suggestion?
OData, the Entity Framework and Windows Azure Access Control
Any chance on elaborating your PPC business? I'm looking into that space and could use some resources! Email would be great, too.